Metaphysical Outlaw grit: Travel just to go
Posted on: February 4, 2026
Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise; seek what they sought.
—Matsuo Basho
By: Erik Rittenberry
| Poetic Outlaws. Feb 1 |
I awake to the ethereal wind singing in the trees.
The morning ash sky overhead as I roll my aching body
out of the tent.
The grass is damp on my bare feet.
My body worn and ragged from yesterday's
18-mile trek through the forest.
I strip naked and gently wade
into the cold lake.
The ripples of the still water
disperse as the sun emerges
from the night.
I let the golden rays blast my face as I
dry off and sip black coffee in silence
thinking about the great poets, mystics,
and wanderers of the past.
The ancients, the romantics, the transcendentalists, the beats.
The words of Gary Snyder
crop up from the depths,
“Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.”
It was said that the English poet
William Wordsworth
sauntered close to two hundred thousand miles
during his lifetime.
The unrivaled romantic poet would
venture off on foot to unknown landscapes
sometimes with his sister Dorothy,
sometimes alone,
with a rucksack of writing utensils
and notepads, drunk on the nectar
of nature, his senses heightened,
capturing the poetry
of existence.
I wandered as lonely as the cloud
That floats on high o’er valleys and hills.
Just two years after the American Civil War,
John Muir embarked on a thousand-mile impromptu walk
from Indianapolis to the Gulf of Mexico.
It was this wild,
transformative journey that fueled
his devotion to nature,
entirely changing the course of his life.
The clearest way into the Universe
is through a forest wilderness.
In 1878, the Scottish novelist
Robert Louis Stevenson,
took up a 12-day 120-mile trek alone
with his stubborn donkey
through the vast, diverse landscape
of the Cévennes mountains in south-central France.
With no marked trails for guidance,
he journeyed through rocky terrain and
pine forests and grassy meadows with
little more than a sheepskin-lined
sleeping bag stuffed with bottles of wine,
chocolate, books, and coffee.
For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go
I travel for travel’s sake.
The great affair is to move;
to feel the needs and hitches of our life more clearly;
to come down off
this feather-bed of civilization,
and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn
with cutting flints.
Ah yes, we still have it in us, don’t we?
The metaphysical grit it takes to reawaken
the primitive within?
To emancipate ourselves from the
unbreathable world of modernity,
to finally say YES to the neglected
murmurs of the blood.
To let the ancient wind relinquish
the useless urge to know,
to keep the poetic fire forever raging
in the chest.
To depart from the steel and asphalt
of the status quo, the futility
of busyness and the cozy cage
of so-called success.
To live out the secret life
of the imagination,
to live in the NOW in full celebration
of the flesh and spirit,
to break from the lower domains of rational
and discursive knowledge in
search of the higher realms
of unitive experience.
It was Nicolas Berdyaev who
reminded us:
Freedom from "the world" is union
with the true world, the cosmos.
Thus to go out of oneself is to find
oneself, one's true centre...
Ah, yes…
to be enriched with little,
to need almost nothing,
to triumph in solitude,
to evade, at all costs,
the desperate, fear-ridden
state of the contemporary flesh,
those rancorous children
of the profane, glutted to bone
with benign comforts and bloodless
conveniences, their minds riddled
with dogmatic theories and concepts,
their spirits completely severed
from the soil it came out of.
We still have it in us, don’t we?
You and I?
Deep down we all harbor a wayward
inclination to take on that rugged
journey to the sublime,
to revel in the immortal awareness that
lies beyond space and time.
The earth yearns for a radical elevation
of our stifled consciousness,
the courage, once again, to live dangerously,
to move into the unknown,
to become a transcendental drifter
like Wordsworth or Jesus
or Matsuo Basho.
To live in the purity of your own light,
to live beyond all understanding, a treasonous life
bound to no creed or convention,
to live as a renunciation of the
well-worn path.
To be a metaphysical outlaw
who treads lightly upon this war-torn planet,
to shun the mask of social pretenses and untangle
the mind from all ideals and ideologies.
To do the “heart-work on the images
imprisoned within.”
To be a spiritual lunatic forever in exile
in search of a new dawn, roaming
and roaring like a wild-eyed vagabond
beneath the unconcerned skies,
to sit and sip jugs of red wine
like the ancient Chinese poet Li Po,
carefree in a wildflower meadow
beneath the elm trees on blue sky afternoons,
to “drown away the woes of ten thousand
generation!”, to bathe ourselves in the wild
mysteries of the earth, away from
masquerade of the political world,
away from society’s lies
of what it means
to BE
to BE
to BE…
Ah, yes, to BE, to Be like Thoreau
and Whitman, to commune with
nothing but the universal soul
of the here and now,
the OVERSOUL,
“the wise silence”
that slithers throughout
the ether, and come to discover,
once again, the hidden source
of the stream of who we are.
Oh, wandering One, if you are
in search of the greatest treasure,
don't look outside. Look within,
and seek That.
Adonis Diaries 
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